Want to be a Salesforce Developer? Well look what we have here!

As a co-leader of the New York City Developer User Group I've had the please of running a series called "Apex Workshop" with Luke Cushanick Follow @AlwaysThinkin.

The series was designed to teach users with established Salesforce Administrators experience to start the amazing journey to kick-start a developer career, or simply to allow administrators to understand code and know more about how the platform works.

On our first couple of runs, we held the classes in NYC once every two weeks.

Now, however, we have been teaching these classes as Webinar - which means you can join us and/or catch up with all the previous sessions!

5 Must Have Chrome Extensions for Admins (+1 for developers)

I spend most of my days navigating between Salesforce Orgs, screens, and features.
Over time, I found tools that made it easier for me to do this faster and more effectively.
The Chrome extensions reviewed below may be small, or very specific - but they may make life just a tiny bit easier - and who doesn't like it when things become easier?

Most Salesforce admins and developers will find this list a mandatory one!

Without further ado, here they are!

Using Custom Settings to Control Validation Rules and Workflows

As you customize your Salesforce Org you will undoubtedly create many Validation Rules and Workflows.
These are the bread and butter tools of a Button-Click Admin (a term used to describe an Administrator that can develop new functionality on the Salesforce Platform without writing one line of code). 

While very powerful, there are some scenarios where you may want to have more granular control over how and when they work. For example:

• Create a Validation Rule or Workflow that only applies to some users or profiles (instead of hard-coding profile names into the rule itself)
• Have the ability to turn on/off many Validation Rules/Workflows centrally
• Turn off Validation Rules that interfere with Code Deployment, but only for the user that is performing the deployment
• Create 'Sets' or 'Groupings' of Validation Rules that can be turned on/off centrally

There are many other scenarios and the technique that I am about to share with you can be adapted to many other cases.

Though I only explain here how to utilize this technique for Workflows and Validations, it can easily be adapted to control Triggers as well - and in fact I use this extensively in my Orgs.

One Caveat: as of the time of this writing, this method CANNOT be used with Process Builder, since Custom Settings values are not accessible in this tool yet.